Stories

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The team over at DocumentCloud released a gem - and probably one of the most feature-rich "gems" in a while, at that - to help you manage parallel processing through background jobs. The "gem" not only provides you with the actual Job objects, but it also manages a central management server, worker daemons, and even provides a really slick web interface to monitor the whole thing. If you do any kind of background job processing at all, you should do yourself a favor and at least check this out.

By the way, their wiki over on GitHub is incredibly well done... take some notes, people.

Elad Meidar recently created a little rake task that can look through all of your ActiveRecord models and give you a list of basic indices that you should have in place. Once it's finished discovering how poorly you've done, it'll go ahead and create a new migration with the indices that you've missed.

If you're in the market for a ridiculously simple Rails CMS, then have I got the one for you! Yeah.. so I'm not a used car salesman, but it is pretty simple and is built to work with Heroku. It supports file uploads, image thumbnailing, static pages, and ERB-enabled layouts. You should take a look if a simple CMS starts your engine.

Last week, Satish Chauhan created and released a Rails plugin called Launching Soon which makes the process of creating that initial launch page for a new web app as painless as possible. With the gem, you get a temporary landing page, which is interpretted with ERB, and also a simple interface to Campaign Monitor, Mail Chimp, or a local CSV file to easily collect your visitors' email addresses. Really useful for the next time you're launching a new web app.

Corey Ehmke wrote up a nice article this week demonstrating the RSpec --profile (that's dash-dash profile) flag. This flag instructs RSpec display the top 10 slowest tests in your suite, along with exactly how long they took to run. These listed tests would then be prime fodder for some test code refactoring.

Not using RSpec, but still have some slow test issues? Tim Connor's got a great gem called test_benchmark. Similar to the --profile tag for RSpec, this gem will show you which of your Test::Unit tests are slowest and give you some more insight into your test suite.

Remember, Ruby5 will be released Tuesday and Friday mornings, due to your feedback for consistent, morning releases. To stay informed about and active with this podcast, we encourage you to do one of the following:

Previous Episodes

OpenID, Presenters and Cells, git-deploy, and the dog-pile effect are just some of the topics covered in this Friday morning episode. RubyConf also made the list, although it probably shouldn't since they rejected us.

RCov and Pony, with a little bit of Hangman make for a good start. We also cover some Rails authentication options and metaprogramming in Ruby. Finally, what's new in Edge Rails and the Rails Rumble results close out this Friday episode.

Blue Ridge, FunFX and Cucumber, and unit testing your file system interactions round out today's episode - which is obviously a little test-heavy. We also talk about obeying robots.txt, Snow Leopard, and more.